Love Burns Bright Read online

  “Oh, Kathy, of course. Pardon my manners.” My mom reaches out to take Kathy’s hand. “You just reminded me of someone for a moment there.”

  We say our good-byes, and I gather up the box of photos she’s sending home with me. In the doorway, I glance back. Mom’s looking at the picture of my father on the table next to her chair.

  I wish, more than anything, I could tell her that I have found someone, someone who makes me deliriously happy.

  But I can’t.

  When we get home, Kathy makes tea. Lady Grey, my favorite. She knows I need to wind down. I wrap my hands around the cup as she drapes the hand-woven mohair blanket over our laps. A watery slate blue, it’s the first thing we bought when we moved in together, and now it smells like roses because she’d been sitting against it earlier today.

  We burrow into each other and the sofa.

  I sigh, just shy of contentment. “My poor mom.”

  “Oh?”

  She’s stroking my hair. I should be too old to enjoy such a simple act.

  “She wants me to find a nice man who’ll make me happy.”

  We both laugh at the irony of that. It feels good to let the sound bubble out of me, releasing the tension in my chest, an ache I didn’t even realize was there until now.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Kathy now. “I don’t like keeping you a secret. I’m not ashamed of us, you know…”

  “Oh, dear heart, I know. I’ve always known. And it’s okay. I don’t want to cause your mom distress any more than you do.”

  Her parents know about us, embrace us and adore me so much that Kathy jokes if we split up, they’ll keep me instead of her.

  “The more important question,” she continues, “is what’s in the box?”

  “Pictures,” I say. “Uncle Dan’s been reorganizing the storage unit and brought them to her, and she thought I’d like to go through them. I’ll scan them, and hopefully get some stories out of her before…”

  I can’t say the words “before it’s too late,” but Kathy knows. She kisses my head, my cheek, and I take a few shuddery breaths to center myself.

  Later that night, when I most want to sleep, most want to run away from the thoughts, I lie awake. When Kathy rolls over and spoons against me, her back to my front, I snake my hand beneath her arm and grope for her hand. In her sleep, she twines her fingers with mine.

  It’s all I can do not to squeeze so hard I wake her.

  How can it be possible to forget?

  I don’t want to forget.

  I press my face into her shoulder. The soft strands of her hair tickle my face. Disengaging my hand, I gently run it across her hip, savoring the spot at the joint that’s warmer than the rest of her, then down her thigh. She’s taken up running again in an effort to stave off the middle-age spread, and even with my light touch, I can feel the muscles, hard and strong.

  I hadn’t been thinking about sex, really, I hadn’t, but apparently my exploring hand plants the idea in Kathy’s subconscious. Still asleep, she murmurs, a happy hum of a sound, and presses herself back against me.

  I vow never to forget the feeling of her body against mine, nor how my body responds to it. My nipples harden, pressing against her smooth back. Even in the dark, I know the constellation of freckles on her shoulders, and I trace them with my lips and tongue, still gentle, easing her into wakefulness. At the same time, I snake my hand back up to circle her nipples with my fingertips, feeling them crinkle in response.

  When she does finally rouse, she’s already half-aroused: I can smell her earthy musk. I move my hand to touch her, but she captures my wrist.

  “No,” she whispers. “Let me.”

  I assume she means she’ll pleasure herself—although, half-lust-fogged myself, I’m not sure why—but instead she rolls over, insinuating one of those strong thighs between mine, pressing against my mound. Almost involuntarily, I grind against her, smearing her skin with my own wetness.

  I hadn’t realized how excited I’d become, either.

  She cups my face, then tangles her fingers in my hair, pulling me in for a kiss that starts sweet but rapidly grows urgent. Now I feel almost frantic, not for orgasm, but to kiss her, feel her lips and teeth and tongue; to lose myself in the sensation and forget my sadness.

  But not forget her, not forget how she feels, how she makes me feel. Never that.

  She rolls me on my back, rises above me, her thigh flexing against me as she takes first one, then the other nipple in her mouth. We’re past the soft strokes like the ones I used to wake her; now she’s nipping, pinching, tweaking.

  I’m ramping up, passion overtaking rational thought, and yet the two are fighting against each other. I want to track every sensation—her flesh against mine, her quick breaths, the taste of that drop of sweat I just kissed off her forehead—create snapshot memories, preserve them.

  But then she begs, “Come on, baby. Come for me.” Her voice is tight, and I know she’s on the verge, too, from the way I’ve been humping up against her in my own quest for orgasm.

  “You…first…”

  “No.” It’s a moan. “You.”

  I’m not sure which one of us starts first, just that one triggers the other, and back again, and again. We build on each other’s joy, a twining spiral of fever pitch and release.

  “I love you,” she whispers, and I’m sure I will always remember that sound, and the catch in my own throat as I say it back to her.

  Now, exhausted, I finally sleep.

  I’m busy the next few days, so it’s a while before I have the chance to look through the box of photos. I curl up on the sofa with another cup of tea. Kathy’s already there, feet propped up, laptop keys clicking as she works.

  She puts down the computer and sets her glasses on her nose. They’re from the dollar store, shocking green, and she wears them on a beaded chain she made. I don’t need reading glasses—yet—but I borrow them a couple of times to look at some of the older photos where the faces are small and a little blurred.

  Then I pull out one, and in my own intake of breath I can hear the echo of my mother’s gasp from the other day, when she saw Kathy.

  Kathy plucks the photo out of my hand. Her eyes widen.

  “Yeah,” I say. “So, are you a vampire or a time-traveling alien?”

  The picture is of my mom, I’m guessing during college from her age and clothes. The black-and-white photo shows her with another young woman, their arms around each other’s waists as they laugh into the camera. My mom’s scarf is whipping in the wind, while the other woman has a hand up to keep her own hat from blowing away.

  The other woman, who looks a hell of a lot like Kathy.

  Kathy flips the picture over. “Betsy and Charlotte,” she deciphers the faded penciled words. “Who was Charlotte?”

  “I have no idea.” I dig into the box. “I don’t remember Mom ever mentioning her.”

  There are more photos of Charlotte, more than I’ve seen of any other friends of my mom from that era. The ones she’d been close to, she was still in contact with (if they were still alive)…or so I’d thought. The more we find, the more we realize Kathy isn’t Charlotte’s doppelgänger, but at the right angles, there’s certainly a resemblance.

  And, I suspect, there had been something going on between my mother and the lovely Charlotte.

  “Tell me if I’m losing my mind…” I begin.

  “Always,” Kathy vows. I smack her thigh, which reminds me of a few nights ago, which distracts me for a moment.

  “There’s something about the way Charlotte is looking at the camera in some of these,” I finally say. “And the way my mom and Charlotte are together. I know women were…they held hands as friends more often then, that sort of thing. But I feel like I’m seeing a…closer relationship?”

  “I was actually thinking the same thing,” Kathy agrees. “These shots here, of the two of them”—she fans them out on the coffee table—“I think they might have been done with a self-timer, rath
er than someone else taking the picture.”

  “Which might explain why they were free to be so… snuggly.”

  “I think,” Kathy says with a grin, “that your mother might have some ’splaining to do.”

  By the time I visit my mother the next day after work, I’ve convinced myself I’ve been reading too much into the pictures.

  We have our usual hellos, the small talk about the food at the home, that she won at bingo yesterday. Then I bring out the manila envelope.

  “I started scanning those pictures you gave me,” I say. She doesn’t remember, so I remind her about Uncle Dan bringing them. I’m not sure if she agrees because I jog her memory or because she doesn’t want to admit she’s forgotten—whether to me or herself isn’t clear. Is that what we fall into? Playing games with ourselves, convincing ourselves everything is okay?

  “I was wondering,” I continue, handing her a photo. “Who’s Charlotte? I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned her before.”

  I watch as an array of emotions cross my mother’s face. I’m not imagining things. I see fondness, sadness…love.

  “She was a friend,” my mom says.

  “From the looks of it, she was more than a friend,” I say.

  She glances at me. I raise my eyebrows, but I also smile. “Mom,” I say gently. “You can tell me.”

  She bites her lip, and tears fill her eyes. She doesn’t cry, though—she’s cried in front of me only once before, and that was when my father died. Our family, we don’t believe in that sort of thing. Thankfully Kathy’s broken me of that bad habit.

  And then my mother tells me the story. Not in graphic terms; in fact, she dances and skirts around things, darting looks at me to see if I’m picking up the innuendo. Then she looks away again, lost in a memory that thankfully she still has, still clings to.

  What comes out is roughly what I’d suspected: A college fling, she says, that nobody else knew about. It was more than that, though: I can tell from her voice that she’d loved Charlotte. She tells me she and Charlotte had a relationship, but it wasn’t as accepted back then, and—as she insists over and over—she loved my father very much. I’m tempted to say, “So you’re bisexual—that’s fantastic,” but I think using the word will shut her down.

  So I give her my support, my understanding. She seems to relax when she realizes I’m not judging or questioning her.

  Ever since I saw the photos of her and Charlotte and guessed what might have happened, I’d been thinking. My mother may have dementia, but she hasn’t forgotten everything. I can’t treat her like a child.

  She wants me to be happy. She deserves to know I am.

  I tell her about Kathy.

  My mother is silent for a long while. A heavy knot forms in my stomach. Was this a mistake?

  Then, finally, she asks, “Are you happy?”

  “Happier than I ever could have imagined,” I tell her. “She’s the one, Mom. I’m going to spend the rest of my life with her.”

  “It won’t be easy,” she says. She always has to warn me of the negative side of things.

  “We’ve been together for eleven years,” I say. “We’ve weathered the negative so far.”

  “Well, then,” my mother says. “Well. What I want to know is, when’s the wedding? When do I get to walk you down the aisle?”

  I laugh, and we cry, and then we talk about wedding dresses.

  We have the ceremony in the courtyard of the care facility. Just family and a few close friends. The water splashing in the fountain sparkles in the sunlight, and the color in the tiles are mirrored in the riotously blooming flowers.

  On our wedding night, kissing Kathy is like kissing her for the first time and the millionth time, new and yet familiar, fresh and yet filled with the memories of every kiss we’ve shared.

  Before I fall into the mindless spiral of desire, though, I realize something.

  What’s important isn’t the future, isn’t the possible forgetting. What’s important is right now, this moment, glorying in everything that it is with no other goal than mutual pleasure.

  Someday, down the line, we might forget the person…but we can never forget the love.

  PALABRAS

  Anna Meadows

  The only secret I ever kept from Sawyer fit inside an orange crate.

  She almost found it once, the day we moved in together. I had buried it in the backseat of my car, beneath my great-aunt’s quilts and the box that held my mixing bowls. When I saw Sawyer come up the stairs with that wooden crate my grandfather had painted the cobalt of a blue glass jar, my heart was tight as a knot in cherry wood.

  I told her that the things inside had belonged to my grandfather, that I kept them only because they smelled like him, like the cardamom of his favorite tortas and the loose tobacco he rolled into paper. They would mean nothing to me if it weren’t for that, I told her. It could have been anything, I said, as long as it held that same spice and earth.

  She believed me. They always believe you if you want it enough.

  And it wasn’t all a lie. Everything in that crate my grandfather gave me, and every time I took it down from the top of the closet, the whole apartment smelled like my grandmother’s pan de muerto. That’s why I never took it down unless I knew there was enough time to let that perfume slip out the open windows before Sawyer got home. The few times I spent so long fingering its contents that the scent was too heavy to dissipate, I made tortas de aceite with enough cardamom that Sawyer didn’t notice.

  Sometimes I longed to show her everything in that orange crate, to spill its contents onto our bed and give over its secrets. But I didn’t want to lose her. “Never let the boy think you are smarter than he is, m’ija,” my mother told me. “You never keep him if he thinks you’re smart.” When I met Sawyer, I thought the same went for a woman who dressed like a boy.

  My mother hated that my grandfather gave me so many books. He told me I was smart and that if I did not read enough, I would get lonely. “You want to know things,” he said. He could tell by the ring of blue-black around the brown of my irises. So he brought me a book each time he came to visit. One month a book of Irish poets who sang of a land so green it broke their hearts open. Another, a dictionary, because whenever I asked my mother what a word meant she said, “You ask so many questions, you stop being pretty one day,” and told me to stir the Spanish rice. For my birthday, a hardcover about the birds of the cloud forests where he met my grandmother. Its glossy pages shined with the emerald of hummingbirds and the blue tourmaline of the quetzal’s tail feathers.

  He had brought me books for two years when my mother told me I was getting too smart. “No boy likes you if you talk like that,” she said. “Todas aquellas palabras.” All those words. It was two months before my thirteenth birthday, and she bleached my hair to the yellow of the masa we used for tamales. She said making me blonde would make up for all those books because my hair would keep boys from seeing those rings of midnight blue around my eyes.

  Even after my grandfather was gone, my mother kept dyeing my hair. When I moved out, I did it myself, a force of habit as strong as biting my nails or reading la Biblia before bed. I knew she was right. I needed the maize-gold of my hair to hide what my grandfather had seen. He might have loved me for it, but no boy would.

  When I moved in with Sawyer, I had to get rid of most of my grandfather’s books. I could only keep as many as I could hide. Choosing which would stay was harder than picking which doll and which two dresses to take with me when I was a little girl and my family had to evacuate for the canyon fires. It was harder than how I never opened my eyes all the way in front of Sawyer, afraid she’d see those rings of blue. She always thought it was how I flirted with her, half closing my eyes like that.

  A book about chaos theory had taught me that a butterfly flitting its wings at just the right time off the coast of my abuela’s hometown in Guatemala could turn the tide of the Mediterranean Sea. It sounded so much like a fairy tale, that littl
e winged creature pulling on the oceans as much as the moon, that I grew drunk off dreams of las mariposas and a million coins of water. It had to come with me.

  A small paperback, a French children’s book about a boy who loved a rose so much it lit all the stars for him, more than earned the sliver of space it took up in the orange crate. The corners of a picture guide to the wildflowers of North America were still soft from my grandfather’s thumbs, so I kept it. I held on to a hardcover of Neruda’s poems if only for the line, “I do not love you as if you were salt-rose or topaz.”

  Books would not have been such a secret for most women. They would have slid them onto the same shelves with their lovers’, letting the spines mix until they could not have remembered whose began as whose if not for the names written onto the flyleaves. But I never forgot my mother telling me, “Never let the boy think you are smart.” Sawyer loved me for my pushup bras and rosewater perfume, my cayenne-colored lipstick and all that yellow hair I made endless with hot rollers each morning. It didn’t matter that by the time we’d been together for three years, she knew I dyed it.

  I loved Sawyer for her saffron-colored hair, always just long enough to get in her eyes. I loved her for how the weight of the Leatherman on her belt pulled her jeans just enough to show a band of bare skin at the small of her back. I loved that her tongue always tasted like salt water.

  I loved these things about her the way she loved those things about me, so it was not fair to let her know I was curious and smart like my grandfather had told me. It would have changed too much. It would have made her doubt the way I laughed when she traced a finger along the scalloped lace of my bra, or how, after I ironed her shirts, I liked leaving a blush of lipstick on those clean, starched collars. All of that was true. All of it was as much me as the secrets inside that orange crate. But Sawyer might not have believed it. My mother might have been right about all my words.

  Sawyer had loved me that way for seven years when I came home and found her with my grandfather’s books. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving. She’d taken down the Christmas decorations from the high shelf of the closet and had found my orange crate behind the boxes.